What is Digital Marketing-Its Importance for Small Businesses
What would you do to save a failing business and keep the customers knocking at your doors? You may be old school resorting to the traditional marketing where KPIs are poor, and you make rough estimates. In 2022, it’s simply crap and useless. You may think of digital marketing as something young kids do to sell t-shirts. Right?
Digital marketing has the benefit of robust measurement. It’s turning online content into business value. There are many platforms you can use to market your products online. You have already heard about digital marketing but may not know how important it is for your business in 2022.
We have covered everything from soup to nuts in this article for you. Learn what digital marketing is, its importance, and how it can save your business.
What is Digital Marketing?
Many people confuse digital tools with strategies or overall systems. Thus, they set up a blog and claim they are marketing products/services online.
Well, that’s not the case. Digital marketing contains a holistic approach to creating strategies and putting them into practice with the help of tools such as SEO, social media, affiliates, and much more. Without a feasible strategy, we cannot call selling something marketing. Therefore, you must have a plan of action to market your products online. So, we can say that there isn’t any such thing as digital marketing other than digital tools and their use to market anything.
It can be defined as promoting, selling, and marketing your products/services/ideas on the internet to the people who are looking for them or are the prospective audience.
You may not know people don’t buy products, but they buy ideas. Ideas that seem to help them with their problems. Ideas that could change what they want to change in their life. People buy things due to pain and pleasure. Therefore, they buy products because they believe that the product will enrich their lives.
In short, digital marketing is human communication to satisfy the wants and needs of people rather than throwing away information they don’t need.
Scope of Digital Marketing?
What do you do when you want to find your answers? You Google it. People search for solutions to their problems on digital media. It implies that people constantly roam and stay there. So, naturally, it becomes a place of great market potential.
Around 85% of Americans go online daily. They visit different social media platforms and use search engines. It’s clear under the sun that the digital landscape is becoming the sole marketing medium for businesses in 2022.
The more people stay active online, the more they are attracted to different products and services. That’s why it’s clear that most digital marketing skills have great scope for businesses. You need to see how many people are on the internet. More than half of the world’s population is on the internet. According to a data reportal, 63% of the world’s population use the internet daily.
The overall traffic gets distributed to different digital tools, including blogs, social media, emails, etc. Marketing has a simple rule: Showcase your products/services to the right people at the right place. By that rule, we can say that the digital world is full of enterprise opportunities.
Is Digital Marketing Killing Traditional Marketing?
Advertising, PR, cold calling, billboard ads, and other traditional marketing tools are no longer effective. They are simply a waste of time and money nowadays. That means the annoying ad you see daily at night and your favorite TV show isn’t helping the business owner either.
A recent HBR study shows that customers have found new techniques and buy your salesy hook to purchase a product. They nor take your product at face value to solve their problems.
That’s where digital marketing works. It considers all the online marketing channels and finds your product online. After enough trials, digital marketers tweak their strategies and choose the right path. For instance, you are selling gloves online. Your digital marketing strategy will include all the channels: Amazon, Shopify, Facebook, Instagram, and Blogs.
After assessing your product’s marketing performance, you need to find which suits you the best to get the most ROIs. Traditional marketing has evolved into a much more sophisticated type of marketing that involves market analytics and science to generate reasonable sales.
Digital Marketing for Small Businesses
Before digital marketing, small businesses and startups had to make a lot of effort to launch their products into the market. They need to get the first-page advertisement position in the magazine. They had to spend many dollars on TV advertising, yet to see little to no ROIs.
They also failed to track their marketing performance confidently as they didn’t have enough data to set their KPIs. With the advent of the internet and Web 2.0, doing business on the internet has become fairly easy.
Now, things have gone to a higher level. Due to social media platforms, search engines, and other digital tools, startups find it easy to market their products or services.
Let’s find out why building your online presence for small businesses is becoming necessary.
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Customer Reach
Imagine selling your locally made product to the international markets. How good would it be to earn the maximum revenue from your sales across borders? It’s an enticing prospect and a dream for most businesses.
Digital marketing provides the platforms to increase your customer outreach. You can showcase your products/services to your customers online. Even a person living on the island of the Philippines can purchase a product based in the USA. That’s the power of the digital medium.
On the other hand, traditional marketing techniques like billboards and TV advertising can’t cover all the audience. Therefore, it has lower purchases and results in lesser ROIs.
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Targeted Audience
What was the most annoying part of watching your favorite cartoons in your childhood? None. It used to be the ad that suddenly popped during the show. No one wants to watch such irritating ads because no one needs that product. What does it mean? It means that traditional marketing tactics do not target the right audience.
As a small business owner, you must shift towards digital marketing techniques. A host of marketing analytics tools will identify whom you want to sell your products.
People on social media have provided some information about them. These tools track that information, synthesize it with AI, and target the right people searching for the same solution.
Besides the GDPR and privacy guidelines, Bigtech is adept at targeting potential customers. For instance, if you continuously search for something on Google and then switch to social media, you may see the ads for the thing you searched for.
That’s how digital marketing helps people get what they want without searching excessively here and there.
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Track Your Campaigns
Most of the company’s budget is spent on marketing, which is the key to a successful business. Every business owner wants to hear the most cost-effective marketing strategy to get maximum revenues.
Traditional marketing squeezes money from the business and still can’t give what an entrepreneur is looking for. Moreover, those marketing campaigns are rather rigid, as no one can tweak a sales copy once it gets published in a magazine.
On the flip side, you can use digital marketing to track your progress. You can see how much you have spent on marketing and how much you have earned so far.
Thus, you can overhaul your campaigns and monitor their performances. To demonstrate, you can use Facebook’s ads manager to find the right audience and target them, set your budget, and see how many impressions, clicks, and purchases you get.
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Increase Credibility
Suppose you want to purchase shoes. Would you go to any random shop to get one? Naturally, you may like to get reviews from different sources or visit a brand you have been a customer with. That’s how a buyer’s psyche works. People don’t trust without knowing the company’s credibility, reviews, and testimonials.
Digital marketing provides everything right off the bat. Before making a purchase decision, your customers can visit your website and see its reviews to develop a rapport with your company.
Benefits of Digital Marketing
There are alot of benefits of digital marketing. The core value is the ease of doing business. Whether you are a business owner or customer, the ease of purchasing or selling is exceptional.
Let’s hop on some of the benefits of digital marketing.
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Retains Your Customers
Have you ever purchased a product twice, maybe three or four times? If yes, that’s because of the brand’s customer retention techniques. Traditional marketing deals with the physical realm. No company has the budget to meet each customer daily after the purchase. So, how do they win customer loyalty and stop them from visiting their competitors? It is due to digital marketing tactics.
With the help of email sequences, companies draw in old customers again for purchase. Similar to your brand is worth using, you can create a social media channel to keep in touch with your customers. That’s where you can pitch your new products again to them and bring them back to you.
Customer loyalty can create a domino effect on your sales. Each satisfied customer will come back and bring others with them to your shop.
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Helps You Communicate with Your Customers
The internet world is full of distractions. The current attention span of customers is less than 10 seconds, which makes it hard for a business to engage customers in a single ad.
People see an ad and get interested but then leave the decision pending for the future. To keep them engaged, you need to remind them of their problems and communicate with them to purchase your product or service.
That’s why digital marketing is the best option to help your customers at each step of their buyer’s journey and bring them to the sale.
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Cut Your Marketing Costs
You don’t have to be a maths geek to determine if digital marketing is cheap. The money goes to TV commercials, and Radio ads can strain your pockets. They are more expensive than digital channels.
Moreover, traditional marketing doesn’t have a proper mechanism to track the customers. For example, a person sees your ad on a billboard and visits your shop to purchase a product.
You never know about the customers’ journey and can’t estimate how many customers are converting. Thus, you can’t retarget the customers who just saw your ads.
On the otherhand, let’s see you run an ad on Google. You can find who clicked your ad but didn’t purchase your product. Thus you can retarget your ads to sell more products.
That way, you can lower your cost spent on marketing and promotion.
Final Words
It’s hard to define digital marketing as a set discipline. There exist a broad range of techniques to sell your products online. When you optimize those tactics to create a marketing strategy, we call it digital marketing.
In 2022, there is a great need to bring your business to the digital landscape. There are numerous benefits of marketing your products digitally. The biggest one is the cheap cost and greater revenues. You can enhance your small business by adopting digital marketing practices.
